1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device for controlling a conversion ratio of a movement amount of a cursor with respect to a speed, and a method thereof. More particularly, it relates to a device for controlling a conversion ratio of a movement amount of a cursor which is capable of conveniently operating a pointing device even if the setup of an aspect ratio or resolution of a display is changed, and a method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
In personal computers (which are generally referred to as PCs) currently coming into widespread use, commands input through an input device, such as a pointing device (for example, a mouse, a track ball, or a touch screen) or a keyboard, are transmitted to a PC main body to operate applications, such as word processing software, table calculating software, and internet browsing software.
The pointing device (hereinafter, referred to as a ‘device’), which is one kind of input devices, is a representative input device of the PC employing GUI (graphical user interface) that is currently being used. That is, since a PC not equipped with the device has difficulty in operability, the device is positively necessary.
The device divides an input operation into an x component (the horizontal direction) and a y component (the vertical direction) and then converts them into signals (hereinafter, referred to as ‘input values’). The input values are transmitted to a PC main body, and are converted into output values by being calculated using a program provided in the PC main body. Subsequently, the output values are transmitted from the PC main body to a display terminal device (hereinafter, referred to as a ‘display’), so that a cursor moves on the display according to the output values. That is, since the operation of the device is directly connected with the operation of the cursor, an operator of the device feels unpleasant when the cursor is not operated well or moves in an unintended direction.
A change in the resolution of the device may cause the poor operation of the cursor or the movement thereof in the unintended direction.
When the resolution of the device is changed, an image display region is changed although the size of the display is the same. For example, when the resolution is changed from VGA (which has a display resolution of 640 by 480 pixels) to SXGA (which has a display resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels), the image sizes of the x component or the y component on the screen are doubled (the size of the image display region increases by four times). That is, in order to move the cursor by the same distance as that before the resolution is changed, the operator of the device needs to input, to the device, the amount of movement two times larger than that before the resolution is changed. Therefore, the operator of the device cannot move the cursor with high operability.
These conventional problems have been raised before. It has been attempted to solve the problems by some measures. Among them, a function of controlling the movement amount of a cursor of a pointing device has been used as a more effective measure (see Japanese Patent No. 2737711).
The function of controlling the movement amount of a cursor of a pointing device (hereinafter, referred to as a ‘prior art’) is a technology that includes a device for detecting a change of a resolution and moves a cursor by applying the conversion ratio (conversion ratio means a ratio of a resolution after change to a resolution before change, hereinafter, referred to as a ‘simple conversion ratio’) to the movement amount of a device. The conversion ratio is obtained by calculation from resolutions before change and after change.
An advantage of the prior art is that the movement amount of a cursor on the screen is not changed between before and after change of the resolutions, although high-resolution (which means more than XGA (resolution of 1280 by 768 pixels) for 14 inch (diagonal display area)) is set. Therefore, according to the prior art, excessive movement amount should be input to the device to achieve the complete movement of a cursor.
However, since the display capacity of a display has been rapidly advanced, various problems arise when the development of a new technique does not keep up with the advance of the display capacity.
According to the display capacity of the display current being used, it is possible to select considerably higher resolution, such as QUXGA (which has a display resolution of 3200 by 2400 pixels). Therefore, when the resolution is changed to a resolution higher than a certain level, the minute operability of a cursor is remarkably deteriorated in the related art. For example, it may be easy to roughly move the cursor, but it may be difficult to minutely move the cursor.
Further, displays having different aspect ratios (the ratio of length to width) from that in the prior art, that is, so-called wide displays, can be used for personal computers. In this case, a problem caused by a change of an aspect ratio arises in addition to a problem caused by the change of resolution to the previously determined value. For example, when the resolution is changed from XGA having an aspect ratio of 4:3 to WXGA (which has a display resolution of 1280 by 720 pixels) having an aspect ratio of 16:9, a simple conversion ratio is extended in the horizontal direction by one and a quarter times, and is reduced by 0.94 times in the vertical direction. That is, when the aspect ratio is changed, a difference in conversion ratio occurs in the horizontal direction and the vertical direction. As a result, the movement amount of the cursor may be different in the horizontal direction and the vertical direction. Then, the movement amount of the cursor is excessively corrected by the change of the aspect ratio, which causes the cursor to be moved in an unintended direction.